The Dounreay silver destruction process for difficult organic wastes

State disposal of organic waste is a requirement throughout the chemical process industry, incineration being used both in the nuclear sector to reduce the volume of some low-level radioactive contaminated wastes before storage and in the non-nuclear sector along with landfill methods. The problem of the ultimate disposal of radioactivity contaminated organic wastes, particularly those containing actinides, has not been resolved however, and the incineration of organic industrial wastes has been shown to result in the formation of even more toxic substances under less than perfectly controlled conditions. This paper reports on the UKAEA at Dounreay. which has been developing a process to treat intractable plutonium dioxide and solvent from the nuclear fuel reprocessing plants